Phil Starr

First of all well done, they look great and I'm waiting for the results you find when you finally get them to a gig. Concentrating on the financial side alone that adds up to £805 including the grilles and that is for two speakers. For that you have two speakers which are 'almost Silverstones' and which have the same care over the crossover design that @stevie always uses. I've had the pleasure of following the development of this with numerous listening and measuring sessions in Stevie's workshop and then listening to the subsequent deveopment of the Silverstone Mk1. I know there were changes to the crossovers which improved the sound in the commercial Silverstones but the most significant to my ears was the use of the Celestion horn which you do have. I too test stuff out at home listening to classical recordings and I'm sure you'd hear a difference but in reality that's a tribute to the sensitivity of the human ear. Your speaker would sound the same as a Silverstone with just bass going through it in a band situation. I know in listening tests the BC112 mk3 would leave the Barefaced offerings way behind in everything other than weight. In terms of cost I think the Silverstones were originally £599 so by building you saved nearly £400. I reckon that's a pretty good return for your labours. However it's a remarkable observation on just what a bargain the LFSys cabs are. You'd expect the materials cost of a commercial speaker to be around 30-35% of the cost at most. Add on labour, production and distribution costs and that initial Silverstone should have been somwhere in the £1,000-1200 price bracket. It's only by selling direct and limiting production that LFSys can keep the prices so far below their competitors. The reality is that your speakers are worth £1,000 in terms of the quality of sound they will deliver and what it would cost to buy the equivalent commercially buying from anyone other than LFSys.

I was really impressed with this the first time I saw it and more so now I've had a follow up listen. I think this puts to bed the arguments about putting bass through PA with no back line or the use of (great) quality 12" tops without having to use subs. It clearly can be done and outdoors too. It also shows you don't have to sacrifice bass tone because that was spot on too. That's not saying that subs are inappropriate in other situations with different music, bigger arenas or for whatever reason but that this is a PA with wide applicability which would do most of the gigs the majority of us do. I wouldn't claim to sound this good but I gigged for four years with QSC K12-2's and never a problem or hiccup with bass and Kick going through the PA. We used subs twice I think in four years and only for outdoor gigs. And Al I love the band

Look up Tuff Cab paint from Blue Aran applied by roller it gives a fantastic professional finish and is genuinely tough as you'll find out if you ever have to sand it off. It'll also be ideal for renvating your 2x10 and a can will probably do all three cabs.

That sounds like a plan Good Luck

Thanks John I've no knowledge of which drivers they've used over the years though I do know one enquiry a few years back for TS parameters yielded the answer that they didn't know what they were which was a little bit of a surprise

Hi David welcome to the party. I see you live in Exeter, not too far from me and I've played in Exeter a lot over the years, including many of the open mic venues. You'll find the 1x10 to be remakably able and it's all I'd ever take to open mic's or jam sessions. In fact I take a much smaller 1x6 to most open mics. I've done dozens of gigs with just a single 1x10. I ended up with the prototype and didn't expect to use it but though I have more expensive cabs it is still my go to cab. Two of them would be seriously good gigging set up. That's with the Celestion drivers though, the Ashdown drivers might not work quite so well. The crossovers are designed for that particular combination of drivers too so you could end up with a mis-matched cab and a miss-matched crosssover. I don't want to be too pessimistic though, most drivers cluster around a fairly similar performance level and for all I know Ashdown may have used re-badged Celestion drivers. That cab would suit a range of drivers and you might be lucky. the crossover was optimised for the 110T but it's a very simple thing so it would kind of work and I've seen much worse in commercial cabs. I'm not trying to put you off but if you are aware of the limits of your plan then at £35 you don't have an awful lot to lose and a reasonable chance of success.

I too can see no problems. We had a guitarist who used a Helix which tbh sounds consistently better through the PA than a mic'd up cab or a DI. He used in-ears or an Alto TS10 for monitoring which he upgraded to an RCF310 after borrowing mine. I've also worked with other guitarist using multi fx/modellers and it's been a positive experience all round. Reducing stage volume and using the PA for heavy lifting is the future

Have you developed British understatement She pretty much nailed that and so did the band. I wonder if Led Zeppelin recorded through that mic would have sonded an awful lot better? She's a lovely person too, she thanked the bassist first If you are playing with people like that no-one is going to notice you smiling, and it would be a shame if anyone upstaged her. Just wind her up and let her go.

I think you've nailed it there. I've done some successful gigs with a great front person and the crowd have lapped it up even though the band were embarassingly bad and played with and seen great musicians who never really made any attempt to reach out leaving a sterile atmosphere with a disinterested audience. I'd way rather play with a great front person with an okay voice than a great singer with no personality on stage. Band interaction is good though. I try to be a foil/straight man for the singer. My duo partner and I kind of heckle each other between songs, the first time we do it in a set the audience wonder what is going on but then get that it is an act and often join in. It has to look natural though most of the 'moves' have started up on stage as a spur of the moment thing but when they have had a reaction become part of the set. One female singer used to try and put me off playing bass when she wasn't singing, just as a tease. The audience soon picked this up and seemed to love her for it.

Ha ha, I think you do protest too much, you do many more than a 'couple' of crowd peasers in your set They are also placed where they should be; mainly at the end of the second set. I'd happily gig that lot. That's actually a set of well known songs from a band of people who know their audience and want to entertain. They also hang together as whole so consciously or not you've decided to give the audience a good time. You guys are very clear who 'your' audience is.

I feel your pain. I've been though a bit of it myself recently, much the same position in that there are two of us committed to the project and we've had a series of false starts with people turning up to rehearsals unprepared. It's horrible to turn up to rehearsals only to find you are wasting your time and everyone else's because one person hasn't done their homework. Doubly horrible becaue you know you are going to have to tell them they aren't needed and then go through the process of finding yet another new person and making another fresh start. Firstly I think it is quite possible that a band can thrive if you are all in other bands but it's really simple: once you've accepted a gig you do that gig lettig the other bands know you aren't available and you turn up to rehearsals prepared, exactly as other people have said. I actually don't think it is a bad thing to have a band where a couple of you are highly committed and others come in for the ride so long as everyone has a degree of professionalism in their attitude at least. I've played bass for a band where I took no part in decisions and just turned up and played. It was one of the most fun experiences I've had at gigs, all I had to do was learn the songs and turn up and play. The motivation was that audiences enjoyed themselves and I got to play a load of new songs without worrying about anything but playing bass. I've found I've needed to develop a thicker skin in all this. Most musicians I've met are pretty focussed on what they want to do, and partly that is a sensible and practical attitude. I play strictly covers, the thought of playing someone else's poorly written songs or trying to find an audience for an unknown band fills me with dread. If I'm looking to join an existing band then the first thing I want to see is their set list. How many songs do I already know? Do I like the songs and want to play them? Do I think they are out to please an audience of just themselves? How many gigs are they doing and will they be a decent venues? How far away are the gigs and the rehearsal rooms? Do they look organised or disorganised? Can I deliver what they want? I can't ask all these questions myself and then complain when they look at my band in the same way, balancing the pain and effort against the rewards works both ways For many of us the rewards are lots of good gigs. I'll rehearse because I need to and I'll turn up prepared because I hate letting people down. I've got a bit of pride and lets face it sometimes you need to rehearse. I don't want to be in a band that spends time in the rehearsal room every week for six gigs a year. I'm a grown up (some of the time) if a band are getting good gigs, fun to be with and moving forwards I don't need any other motivation.

I'm not sure About being totally disinterested in LFSys as Stevie is a friend but it would be a shame if there wasn't a clear answer here, as well as being available elsewhere. 'Hearing' yourself on stage isn't a simple thing. Everything you play is made up of a wide range of frequencies and you won't hear all those frequencies equally well. In addition there are lots of other sounds reaching your ears: the rest of the band, reflections of your own sound reflected off every hard surface in the room, the PA sound and the audience sound just to mention the loudest sources. Your ears pick up this jumble of noise and your brain interprets this the best it can so you hear what you want. Your hearing isn't an accurate map of whet gets to your ears it's the best your brain can do with the information it has. It's probably quite useful to think of signal and noise. Signal is what you want and noise is all the distracting stuff from elsewhere. If the signal falls below the noise you are still picking it up but the brain can't turn it into anything useful. It can be as loud as you like but the information isn't useful to you. Now to fully understand you'd have to look at each frequency seperately but it's more useful to look at three bands bass, middle and treble. I'm going to look at bass and middle as there isn't a lot of top end coming from your bass. So now we come to the physics of speakers, the crucial bit is that the way sound is radiated depends upon the relationship between the diameter of the speaker and the wavelength of the sound it is trying to reproduce. If the wavelength is longer than the diameter of the speaker it is radiated evenly in every direction. As the wavelength becomes shorter and shorter the sound is increasingly radiated into a narrow beam of sound and a big speaker is radiating the mid-rnage and treble more like a searchlight or torchbeam than the bulbs that illuminate the room. 10" speakers means searchlight for most of the midrange 2x10 doubly so and the midrange is where all the signal is that you need to hear what you are playing. With no tweeter your Two10 stands very little chance of getting the signal to your ears unless you raise it right up to ear level and point it straight at your head. Even raised on an 18" platform the mid range is going past your waist not your ears. So adding a tweeter and crossing over at lower frequencies mean they won't beam and using a horn directs and controls the radiation pattern to an extent. LFSys crossover slightly lower than any other specifiacally bass speaker so you'll get more mids going to your ears and they have one extra trick; the horn is rotated 90deg so that the widest radiation is in the vertical plane and not horizontally as you would get with a PA speaker. Hearing bass isn't an issue, on most stages you are swamped with bass. Firstly you will hear the bass from the PA and at the same volume as the audience as it is radiated 360deg, In fact since you are closer to the PA in most venues than the majority of the audience the bass can be even louder than the reat of the on-stage sound, secondly you'll hear all the reflected bass off the walls, ceiling and floors all with a slight time delay smearing the sound so you'll get loads of complaints about the bass being so loud whilst being unable to hear enough mid-range to really hear the details of what your bass is doing. The Monza and Monaco in particular have a really tightly controlled bass and this also helps.

This is how I use my Monza. I try to set everything up so I get the same sound from headphones, studio monitors, PA,and the bass rig. You’ll find that it is a little more complex than it sounds because of the room acoustics and because; well our ears are sensitive and speakers aren’t good enough to fool anyone. Functionally it works well enough though. DI is always going to sound better for the audience anyway as all mics just introduce added distortion and added stage noise. It may give you a sense of control in bypassing the sound tech but if they are determined enough to make you sound sampled then you won’t stop them with a mic 😄 You may want to mic up for recording of course. @stevie used a measuring mic in developing his designs so hopefully he will come along to help.

What @mike257 describes sounds like heaven, probably in more ways thatn one. For most of us the 'Festival' is a beer festival, a charity event or an overgrown village fete which has grown from one local band using their own PA to a multi band event with a hired in PA. Often the PA has been set up by a hire firm but the organisers have saved money by not hiring a sound engineer. Typically you come across a couple of blokes who have no idea of how the PA was set up and are scared to touch anything. They'll spend 20 mins plugging things in at random and line checking then huddle down by the desk with no sound check staring at all the scary knobs whose function eludes them. @warwickhunts 'can you start your set know' sounds very familiar.

Ain't that the truth! It's not unusual for the people who won't give you the information to be the ones asking "why there aren't more gigs?" or "why haven't you organised a reherarsal?" I've now used Rallly successfully once but still have one errant band member who hasn't filled in dates for three months on the second poll I sent out. I think I'm going to plug away with it for a while and see if it can become a habit

Funny you should say that, 😂

About 6 months ago I was playing in the Vintage, Wellington which is a decent music pub with densely packed and usually inebriated audiences. Anyone who has played there will know there is little delineation between the stage and the audience. One young woman, tall, willowy attractive but very drunk came up behind me an wrapped her arms round mine whilst I was playing and started a conversation about which songs she wanted. It's remakably difficult to go on playing and singing with 6 feet of drunken young woman draped over you with your arms pinned to your side. In the end her boyfriend who clearly though it was hilarious came up and politely asked if I would like him to take her away. What is the etiquette in this situation?

An ambient mic would certainly work and be cheaper but you'd probably have to compromise with how the drums sounded in the monitors. Given my experiences i'd rather have single mic drums than some of the IEM feeds I've experienced. The EAD10 is two ambient mics and the kick drum via a trigger and all the eq etc is sorted for you. Even at an ordinary gig it will probably give you as good as/better than you''d get with a 3 mic set up done in a rush. Talking to drummers they are marmite, some won't touch them and some swear by them.

Probably a good provision if you are doing enough of this type of event to justify the expense. I've had several episodes of the monitors being perfect at sound check only to be given someone elses feed during the gig, there's only so much 'can I have a bit more of this and a bit less of that' you can do, especially when you know at least one other band member is wondering why my bass and vocals are dominating their mix. It's reall tough to concentrate and play well when your mix has failed. Probably worse for the poor sod who gets my vocals I'm surprised nobody yet has offered the chance to mix your own monitors via a phone app at the smaller multi band events. IEM's are no longer really cutting edge technology and the apps can usually be locked so you don't have access to FOH. I've mixed these events myself in the past and with 10 min changeovers it can be hell to get everything done and not every band is co-operative or even knows what it is doing. Passing on the extra job of setting up monitors sounds great to me. I could always just feed them FOH if they eff up. On the subject of drums how about the Yamaha EAD10 here It's a load of expense but I've seen drummers use it to mic up their kits and It works OK compared to many people's version of mic'ing a kit.

Nice Job 😮😂 The grille looks to be in good nick and you'vegot corners and the sockets on the back. I can't tell what's underneath but I'd be looking to 'restore' rather than build a new cab. The BassChat 110 which @Stevie designed to fit the 30l cab I'd designed and built for another project would probably work fairly welll but was designed for particular Celestion speakers. they are probably similar to your speakers but won't be identical. Pull the sheet (!) off and see whats underneath, then clean that off then all you would need to do is paint it up with Tuff Cab and you have a restored Ashdown 2x10 which will be worth something. You might love it and if you don't someone else will and give you the cost of the components to make the BC110T properly,then youd have had two fun projects. I think you can make this look as good as new for pocket money

That's interesting, how long ago was that? I got the strong impression from the information I gleaned that it is still pretty much a beta version/under development. I wouldn't want to use something that crashes too often because the band won't use something they don't have faith in.

I do hate google with a vengeance, I hate that it invades everything you do after any engagement with it at all and i don't consent to it using and sharing my data. I've used Timetree and it is such a poor piece of software. Really clunky and counter intuitive to use. I mean it works but finding out how to do anything complicated on it is a nightmare. Ive also used Doodle to gather in availabllity data and liked the simplicity, it's got a lot more sophisticated recently and moved to a paid model but I've recently discovered Rallly which does look and behave just like the older versions of Doodle. You send out a survey with a list of dates/times and people fill in their availability. It's great for booking rehearsals and identifying dates the band are available for gigs. The bit it doesn't do is generate an actual calendar the band can see.

We are having problems agreeing on a calendar app for our band and one band member is suggesting this one. Anyone had experience with it, or tried anything similar?

I love a happy ending 💖

I think that pic is conclusive (though sometimes you can have more than one fault) You should be able to operate the swich manually (be gentle) with a pencil tip and get it to operate. The spring is to turn the stamp of a 16 stone bassist into a gentle push. You could try putting something soft on the bottom of the shortened spring to shim out the gap as a temporary fix while you wait for the replacement spring. A little rubber foot might work, or a piece of felt. Hang off with the Servisol until you've tested the switch. It doesn't so much clean the switch as move the dirt around so there are a limited number of times it will work in a semi-sealed microswitch